Agent-based simulation of dispatching rules in dynamic pickup and delivery problems

This work treats the topic of solving dynamic pickup and delivery problems, also known as dial-a-ride problems. A simulation model is introduced that describes how an agent is able to satisfy the transportation requests. The agent behavior is given in form of a complex dispatching rule, which is optimized by metaheuristic approaches. For this purpose, a fitness function is described which is used to evaluate the quality of a solution. The rule to be optimized is a weighted sum of several primitive dispatching rules where each describes a small part of the information available in the system at a given time. Given a good configuration of the weights, we will show that the agents are able to serve the transportation requests. The optimization of the weights was conducted with the generic, open, and extensible optimization framework HeuristicLab.